This is no ordinary week. Of course, y’all are thinking Bastille Day, which was yesterday. So, “Vive la France.” But France has nothing to do with the extraordinariness of this week.
Today is the glorious end of a chapter in my writing life. Over the weekend, I polished my pitch and got my synopsis to sparkle. Offered it up for feedback to some trusted pals, made a few tweaks and waited for the shoe to drop. There had to be a shoe. Shoe’s have been dropping on my journey as far back as I can remember. Spike heels may no longer be necessary, but surely an army boot or an Air Jordan was on its way. Nothing. So I reread the pitch, the long and short synopses, and set up the Sample Pages document. When no shoes arrived, I felt like Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Well, now I’m dressed, I’m all dressed, there’s nothing else for me to do. [Forlornly, almost fearfully.] I’m dressed, all dressed, nothing else for me to do.
Nothing else for me to do, other than send the materials to agents.
A simple task. Paste all items in an email and click send.
Unbelievable to the point of surreal. Because I’ve been here before. Once in the early 2000s, when the manuscript wasn’t even close to ready. Again in 2019, when the story was better and the writing was stronger, but the only positive response was one request for a full. The rejection was more demoralizing than the first round, especially since out of 27 queries I only received 7 official rejections. My take away— the manuscript, and writer-me, were still not ready for prime time. Oh, woe is me. But not really. The rejection became a challenge to climb every mountain of writing knowledge possible to get the story I believed in out of my beating heart.
You, dear friends, readers and voyeurs were witnesses to my labor of love. Now that phase of the journey is over. Until the book deal comes, there’s nothing else to be done. And so today, I copied and pasted my materials into three separate emails from my list of ideal agents and hit send.
The plan is to do the same each and every Thursday, until I receive that one YES. It only takes one. One agent who believes in the story as much as me, who’s willing to go to the mattresses and find that one editor at a publishing house who’s ready to do the same. I believe that agent and editor is out there. Believe it more than ever before. That has to make a difference, right? Yowza, now I feel like Mrs. Dalloway.
What a lark! What a plunge!